Terrance Park makes his You Tube debut Thursday, February 14, 2013, Park, a bio-statistics major and the president of the U.C. Berkeley math club -- will become the latest in an increasingly high profile video campaign to introduce America to the "Dream Kids, '' students who are in danger of deportation if immigration.

Terrence Park has done plenty of work - in laundries, in restaurants and tutoring in private homes - to realize his dream of getting a college education.

But the 24-year-old UC Berkeley math club leader and biostatistics major from South Korea said Wednesday that he never dreamed he would reveal his biggest secret - that he is an undocumented immigrant - on YouTube.

Park is the star of a new video in which he reveals that he is a one of an estimated 2.1 million American youths whose undocumented parents brought them to the United States as children. Without passage in Congress of the legislation known as the Dream Act, he and the others could have their dreams dashed.

In the video, the math whiz uses a chalkboard to make the case for why he and other young people in the same situation should be allowed to go to college rather than be deported: It would cost U.S. taxpayers $23,000 to deport each of the undocumented youths in the U.S. - for a total cost of $48.3 billion - while such students would produce billions more in wages and economic investments over their lifetime if they were allowed to stay here.

Park's message is part of "The Dream is Now," a campaign led by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. It debuted in January and spun off of her work with the Emerson Collective, a collaborative group established more than a decade ago to promote educational opportunities for youth in underserved communities.

Its latest effort includes a partnership with director Davis Guggenheim ("An Inconvenient Truth" and "Waiting for 'Superman' ") to bring the personal and sometimes heartbreaking life stories of youths like Park directly to voters as part of a push for passage of the Dream Act.

"Terrence Park is my hero," tweeted Shel Waggener, an executive with Internet2, a national firm involved in providing Internet and education services, after the video debuted Wednesday. "This is what the Dream Act means."

As Congress takes up the issue of immigration reform, high-achieving students like Park revealing their stories - and in some cases, risking deportation - dramatize an effort to win a major political debate by reminding Americans of the people involved.

Human stories

"It's important to get the human stories out," UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau said Wednesday.

Birgeneau, who has donated $100,000 toward efforts to help the young undocumented students - and whose campus has led national efforts to provide services to them - said the often-eloquent stories of students are resonating with Americans.

"For a long time, there was so much demonizing of people who came here not of their own will," Birgeneau said. "This is a country of immigrants - and we're a country who welcomes people and tries to help them."

Coming to America

Park said he came to America at age 10, when his mother - seeking economic opportunity for her children after a divorce - brought the family to San Diego. Three years later, they moved to Tustin (Orange County), where he attended high school and found out that he was an undocumented immigrant.

Because money was a big issue, he went to community college, worked at a laundry and a supermarket, worked as a private tutor and saved his money, scraping together the tuition for a semester at Cal.

In 2011, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the California Dream Act, which allowed students who were brought into the country illegally before age 16, attended school on a regular basis, and met in-state residency and GPA requirements to apply for college financial aid benefits.

That "saved my life," Park said, allowing him to study full time and this year, to apply for up to $8,000 in financial aid.

But passage of the national Dream Act may now be critical to his future.

The bipartisan legislation would allow qualified undocumented youths to be eligible for a "six-year-long conditional path to citizenship" that requires completion of a college degree or two years of military service.

Movement restricted

Park says he has been admitted to a biostatistics graduate program at Yale in Connecticut, a state that has no such legislation. Without the ability to apply for loans and financial aid as an undocumented student, he said, he may have to go back to his old job "in the laundry" to earn enough money to pay the bills at Yale.

There has been some movement: In June, President Obama announced a program that would defer deportation of young people like Park for two years if they are illegal immigrants younger than 30 who came to the U.S. before the age of 16, have lived here for five years, are enrolled in school and have no criminal record.

"I define myself as an American," Park said, but he is reminded daily that he is endangered by his undocumented status.

"Our (math) club recently had a guest speaker from a national security agency," who came to Cal to talk about internships, Park said. "I was definitely interested ... but what hit me is that I would get a background check."

He turned it down - and has rejected opportunities to study abroad because of the risk of being barred from coming back to the United States.

Birgeneau acknowledged that the full debate over immigration reform - including a path to citizenship and border security - may be long and hard, but the Dream Act may be the piece with the greatest public support.